1825-26] SCHOOLDAYS 13 The year and a half I spent there seemed to make a complete change in me.' The earliest extant letter of Bright's, in a beautiful round handwriting, almost perfect in its symmetry, is written from this moorland school to his sisters at their school at York. Among other items of news he says: 'We got another little brother on the 14th of this month, Father intends to call him Samuel, which I think is a very pretty name. I have got a hawk here, I don't know whether you have ever seen one or not, it is about the size of a crow, has a crooked bill, is savage, and will scarcely eat anything, but birds, mice and raw flesh. I mean to keep it till I go home, and then I shall lodge it in the Parrot cage. I suppose you have been for a long time expecting a letter from me, but I have waited for an opportunity to have one conveyed to you without cost, which I think can be done now, as one of the boys is going home to Bradford and his father going very often to Leeds can take it there and get it forwarded by some one going to York.' Such were the thrifty thoughts of love before the penny postage removed the tax on family affection. From the valley of the Hodder he came out at the age of fifteen into the world of men and affairs, with a strong body, and a constitution which was to serve him without any serious catastrophe to his health for another thirty years, carrying him safe through the strain of five years' daily and nightly work in the forefront of the Corn Law agitation, and to break down for the first time only after the misery he suffered during the Crimean War. He had also acquired at Newton-in-Bowland a gift destined to be of yet longer endurance than his health, the love of northern hill scenery, and of its running streams. To wander by these, rod in hand, was till the end of his life an insatiable desire and a constant refuge from worldly cares. 'I left Newton,' he writes, 'on the 16th of February 1827, and at the age of fifteen years and three months my school education terminated. I came home and soon began to be employed in my father's mill, and to take an interest in the business. I had learned some Latin and a little French, with the common branches then taught in such schools as I had been placed in. Reading, writing, arithmetic, grammar and geography -no mathematics and no science.' A scanty stock! But as we shall see, his real education in literature, history, economics, and politics, was about to begin with himself as master. The schools of his sect had done well for him, for they had preserved the influences of his home. His boyhood had been passed in the atmosphere of the Society of Friends, that intangible but pervading spirit which instils rather than teaches the doctrine of the equality and brotherhood of men and women, of rich and poor; the nothingness of worldly distinctions; and the supreme duty of humane conduct. He had not, like so many pupils of more fashionable places of education, unlearned the lessons of his home, and of his own nature-the independence of opinion, the quick response to the whisper of conscience, the aspirations after a higher life. He may have suffered more than he learnt from some of his masters, but at least he had not been taught, like most young Englishmen, to quail before the public opinion of his schoolfellows, or to put on the air of being ashamed of the things of the mind and heart. Like Wordsworth, he emerged from these simple old country schools not moulded down to the pattern of gentility or of bourgeoisie, and he had therefore still the chance of growing into a great man. 1827] MANCHESTER AND ROCHDALE 15 CHAPTER II HOME LIFE, BUSINESS, AND POLITICS AT ROCHDALE, UP 'There is no class of people in England more determined and more unconquerable, whichever side they take, than are the people of the county from which I come.'-JOHN BRIGHT in the House of Commons. THE life of John Bright, from the end of his schooldays until his death, falls into two periods of unequal length, of which the exact point of division is marked by the death of his first wife. The first part consists of those years (1827 to 1841) when he took an active share in the business of his father's firm, and did no political or public work except in Rochdale and the neighbouring towns. The second part covers the remaining forty-seven years of his life, during which he devoted most of his time and energies to politics at a distance from Rochdale, his native town becoming to him a place of domestic retreat rather than the scene of his labours. The period of his Rochdale activities, the subject of this chapter, is the key to his subsequent career. For in this period he formed all his economic, social and political views, in which half a century of larger experience wrought little change. As the world appeared to him when he looked at it from Rochdale, such, in London, he found it still. In the second quarter of the nineteenth century, many of the merchant princes and cotton lords of Manchester were already almost as much cut off from social intercourse with the hands whom they employed as were their rivals, the squires, from the agricultural labourers starving in a decent obscurity beyond the park gates. This utter social division between rich and poor, in town and country alike, is still, under much improved economic conditions, a fundamental evil of our own age. And the way in which it formerly exacerbated the acute miseries > of the poor in Manchester during the hungry 'thirties and 'forties was described by two keen observers-Engels and Mrs. Gaskell. In his capacity of German philosophic visitor, Engels noted, as specially characteristic of the epoch and of the country, the long lines of brilliant shop-frontage on the main streets of Manchester, through which the middle class passed from their comfortable homes outside to their business premises in the centre, the whole being so planned that the bourgeoisie need never catch sight of the squalid and noisome regions where the workmen lived, and of which the great city in fact mainly consisted. Mrs. Gaskell, the wife of a Unitarian minister, after working for many years at her husband's side in the slums of Manchester, delivered her soul in Mary Barton. According to her, the social division of rich and poor in the cotton capital was in itself as great an evil as the difference of wealth that caused it. 'At all times,' she wrote,' it is a bewildering thing to the poor weaver to see his employer removing from house to house, each one grander than the last, till he ends in building one more magnificent than all, or sells his mills to buy an estate in the country, while all the time the weaver, who thinks he and his fellows are the real makers of his wealth, is struggling on for bread for his children, through the vicissitudes of lowered wages, short hours, few hands employed, etc.' The meeting face to face of the masters with the men's deputation, in the sixteenth chapter of Mary Barton, shows the gulf between the two worlds down which Mrs. Gaskell bade England look and tremble. Manchester of that day had many merits, and there was as much public spirit and humanity in these merchant princes and cotton lords as in any other class in the kingdom. But the new factory system was beginning to divide them off socially from those whom they employed.1 Now, if John Bright had been brought up in Manchester society, thus divided against itself, he might have held with more qualification his characteristic faith in the common interest of employer and employed, which rendered him so 1 So, too, as regards the Manchester employers and their relations to the weavers, Bamford, the Radical (Early Days, chap. xii.), writes: But even those days (circa 1800), advantageous as they certainly were when compared with the present ones (circa 1840), were considered as being greatly altered for the worse since the days that could be spoken of from remembrance. The two classes of workmen and employer were already at too great a distance from each other, and it was a subject of observation that the masters were becoming more and more proud and uplifted each day.' 1827] MANCHESTER AND ROCHDALE 17 persuasive a champion of the union of all classes against the rural landlords; he would perhaps have been less puzzled by Lord Ashley's denunciations of the cotton lords; and he might, as a human being, have been imbued with less of that sense of his own oneness with the working men which enabled him to lead them to the winning of the franchise, when Cobden stood aside. Although Greenbank mill at Rochdale was only ten miles from Manchester, in some respects it was worlds away. In the smaller manufacturing towns of Lancashire and Yorkshire, many masters were still relatively poor, still preserved the simple habits of life and expenditure, and the old way of mixing on more or less intimate terms with their men, that had marked the manufacturers of former generations. When John Bright at the age of fifteen began to help in the warehouse,' he was entering a society democratic in its atmosphere and singularly free from social distinctions. The cash nexus was far from being the only bond between his father, Jacob Bright, and the hands in the mill, which stood, as was said above, at the door of his own modest dwelling. Jacob Bright knew each one of his employees, and much about their families. So good a Friend could not fail to take thought, after the manner of his sect, for the human beings with whom he came in daily contact. He was often consulted by his people as to their private affairs, and in their quarrels and difficulties was welcomed as a judge in Israel. He was constantly helping their households in those bad times, out of his private means. When any one married he increased their wages. The children employed in the factory were never allowed to be beaten the leathern strap, hung up in so many mills in the bad days before the factory acts, had never been seen at Greenbank. He had the children taught out of his own funds, and finally built them a school. On winter nights, with a large lantern in his hand, and wrapped up warmly in a thick overcoat, he would stand at his mill gates, giving directions to the respective men to superintend the children on their way home.' He was 'owd Jacob' with his men, many of whom continued through life to call his sons plain John' and 'Thomas' when speaking to them. A story, that paints 'owd Jacob' to the life, tells how coming up the hill one day from town he found a neighbour in trouble on the road: a valuable beast of burden belonging to him had met with an accident and had to be killed. The onlookers were thronging round the poor man with expressions of sorrow; to one of the loudest of these Jacob Bright 6 B |